Pharmaceutical products are sold with extensive labeling. Packaging and containers are filled with instructions, warnings, and other information. Goods which can be packaged in vials, such as unit doses of medicaments, are packaged with written instructions inside the box or other package which contains the vial. These vials are intended for use with syringes and are to be applied to the patient at the bedside or other place of treatment.
Typically, nurses will be assigned to give medicines and the like to a number of patients at one period of time. Often times, the administering nurse will have an entire tray or even a cart full of medicines to be given to a part or all of a floor in a hospital. In order to understand the background of the present invention and the environment in which it is intended to be used, it is necessary to visualize a health care worker assembling a cart or tray for a visit to several patients. Typically, the nurse or health care worker will have individual instructions for each patient, and will place those instructions on separate locations on the tray or cart. Reading each set of instructions separately, the health care worker will then place the appropriate medicines from the pharmacy department of the hospital on to the respective instruction sheets or slips of paper.
When tablets or pills are given, they are often placed in disposable cups and one can be relatively certain that the correct patient will be given the correct medicine. Similarly, when medicines are to be given with a syringe, unit dose vials of the correct medicine in the correct amount can be placed on the patient's instruction list or chart and there is every expectation that the appropriate medicine will be delivered to the appropriate patient.
In some instances, however, the medicine which is to be given to the patient will be mixed at the point of administration or use. For example, dilution instructions are often times provided for medicine which, if it is not diluted can cause serious problems. This information is given with the instructions from the Doctor or Pharmacist in most cases. In addition, this information is often printed on the vial label or container itself. Every effort is made to insure that the instructions are followed at the point of administration.
A problem arises when the health care worker relies upon information which is placed on the cap of the container, particularly in containers which have a removable protective cap. These caps are essential to maintain sterile conditions for the medicines, and are designed to be easily removed by a flipping motion of the thumb, while the vial is held in one hand. At that point, the nurse can then add the diluent or perform whatever additional steps are necessary as the medicine is transferred to a syringe and then to the patient. Occasionally, however, the health care worker will remove more than one cap, particularly if a number of treatments are all to be given at one time. Also, even when one medicine is being administered, if it is to be diluted and if the diluent is supplied separately, caps from many containers must be removed. If the container without the cap does not contain the appropriate instructions, or if there is some way for the container to be separated from the cap, thereby losing the instructions, an unnecessary risk is taken.
While every intention is to avoid confusion and haste, sometimes it is unavoidable that the health care worker will have too many patients to treat in too short of time, and the very real possibility exists that the medicine given to a particular patient may not be precisely the treatment which the doctor has prescribed. While sometimes too much or too little diluent may not cause a significant problem, the very real possibility exists that improper administration of medicine can cause serious harm to the patients being treated.
As simple as it sounds, there have been many tragic examples of mistakes being made by health care personnel. These mistakes has caused lives and have endangered the lives of many others. For example, many deaths occur nationally each year because of a mix-up of sodium chloride and potassium chloride which, if not diluted, can cause death. And yet, at the present time, there is no system for product identification of pharmaceutical products and the like which is designed specifically for a point of application treatments. In many instances, where removable outer caps are used for protection of the patient and maintenance of sterile conditions, the cap is placed near the vial. Yet there is no real assurance that the cap and vial match at a later time when the busy health care worker picks up the medicine for a particular patient.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide additional safety at the point of use of medicines. It is a specific object of this invention to provide a system for pharmaceutical product identification which can be used at the point of application to insure the proper identification and other information be communicated to the nurse or other health care personnel.